Climate change engagement of scientists


Abstract

Climate change is one of the biggest threats to humanity. Scientists are well positioned to help address it beyond conducting academic research, yet little is known about their wider engagement with the topic. We investigate scientists’ engagement with climate change using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a large-scale survey (N = 9,220) across 115 countries, all fields and all career stages. Many scientists already engage in individual lifestyle changes, but fewer engage in advocacy or activism. On the basis of our quantitative and qualitative results, we propose a two-step model of engagement to better understand why. Scientists must first overcome intellectual and practical barriers to be willing to engage, and then overcome additional barriers to actually engage. On the basis of this model, we provide concrete recommendations for increasing scientists’ engagement with climate change.

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Fig. 1: Descriptive statistics of key variables.
Fig. 2: Results of individual multilevel logistic regressions predicting engagement.
Fig. 3: Model for barriers to climate change engagement of scientists.

Data availability

We used the Scopus database72 to identify scientists and academics who were subsequently invited to participate in the survey. The anonymized data used for analysis are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12187345 (ref. 74).

Code availability

The code and all materials are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12187345 (ref. 74). Together with the data (see above), these allow the reader to reproduce all analyses, results and figures reported in the paper.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NWO gravitation grant number 024.004.016 (to J.H.), Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc Mobility Fellowship P500PS_202935 (to V.C.), the Harvard University Faculty Development Funds (to V.C.) and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (PhD scholarship) (to A.B.). We thank G. Gallo from New Environments and D. Mackey for help with Fig. 3, and T. Fossen, K. Nielsen, A. Urai and C. van Eck for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Contributions

F.D. conceived the initial idea of the study and F.D., M.S.M.S., J.M.B.H., V.C., N.-M.G., C.B., A.J.K.G. and A.R.A. contributed to its conceptualization. F.D., M.S.M.S., J.M.B.H., N.S., N.M.G., A.B. and A.R.A. contributed to the formal analysis of the quantitative and/or qualitative data. F.D., M.S.M.S., J.M.B.H. and N.S. contributed to the methodology of the study, the data collection strategy, software used for the study administration and/or analysis. F.D., N.S., M.S.M.S., A.R.A. and A.B. contributed to the validation of the study results. F.D. and J.M.B.H. performed data visualization. F.D., M.S.M.S. and J.M.B.H. curated the data, administered the project and wrote the original draft. F.D., M.S.M.S., J.M.B.H., V.C., C.B., A.J.K.G. and A.R.A. reviewed and edited the original draft.

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Fabian Dablander.

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The authors declare the existence of a non-financial competing interest. All authors have engaged in climate change advocacy or activism.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Number of observations per country in our data set.

Please note that Hong Kong (n = 32) is not included as a separate country on this map, but is modelled as a separate country in all other analyses that include country as a variable.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Distribution of Scopus and our sample on key variables.

The dashed lines indicate the median of the respective distributions.

Extended Data Table 1 Representativity of survey sample as compared to the Scopus sample based on characteristics provided within the Scopus database (top) and the authors continent (bottom)
Full size table

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Text, Figs. 1–8 and Tables 1–9.

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Dablander, F., Sachisthal, M.S.M., Cologna, V. et al. Climate change engagement of scientists.
Nat. Clim. Chang. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02091-2

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  • Received: 19 December 2023

  • Accepted: 14 July 2024

  • Published: 05 August 2024

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02091-2


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